Bangladesh police on Monday said they arrested 1971 Liberation War veteran and former bureaucrat Abu Alam Shahid Khan, a prominent critic of Muhammad Yunus’s interim Government, amid a series of detentions of dissenting voices since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina’s regime.
“He (Khan) has been arrested by Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s detective branch in a case lodged with the Shahbagh police station,”police said in a statement, without specifying the charges or disclosing the time and place of the arrest. However, the statement said that five others were also arrested in the same drive for participating in “flash marches”, impromptu street protests frequently staged by activists of the now-disbanded Awami League of deposed Prime Minister Hasina. Police said they were arrested on charges of attempting to carry out acts of sabotage and defying public order.
Khan, a retired secretary in the Bangladesh Government, had in recent months been criticising the interim Government on social media platforms. He is the fourth prominent critic of the interim Government to be arrested in recent weeks.
On August 7, Yunus’ staunch critic and former Rangpur University vice-chancellor Professor Nazmul Ahsan Kalimullah was taken into custody. On August 27, Dhaka University law professor Hafizur Rahman Curzon and journalist Manjurul Alam Panna were detained under the country’s stringent Anti-Terrorism Act.